End of power shortage in sight?

By Herbert Vego

THERE is no certainty about an end to power outages, if we heard Raphael “Rap” Dorilag right.

“We may have to wait until October,” he told Angel Tan, the host of “MORE Power at Your Service” radio-TV program.

Dorilag is the manager of MORE Electric and Power Corporation’s Trading and Sourcing Department.

He was reacting to the fact that customers of MORE Power and electric cooperatives in the Visayas had been agonizing from rotational power outages this month.

It’s because of sudden outages of two major coal-fired power plants, namely the 169-megawatt (MW) Unit 2 of Therma Visayas Inc. (TVI) of Aboitiz Power Corp. in Toledo City, and the 105-MW Unit 2 of Kepco SPC Power Corp, in Naga, Cebu.

Reports also said that eight other power plants had implemented forced outages due to breakdowns.

The combined capacity of the plants that went offline is equivalent to the power requirement of an entire island such as Panay.

On Monday this week, however, Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Sharon Garin said in a press briefing that the Aboitiz and Kepco the actual cost of producing electricity from power plants coal-fired power plants would return to service forthwith. That’s like saying that the days of interrupted power supply are numbered.

Does it follow that we are at the mercy of these two power plants?  Without them, therefore, MORE Power and the electric cooperatives would have to grin and bear the blame of their “powerless” customers.

In other words, once these two power plants are disabled, the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) would not have enough electricity to transmit to the distribution utilities (DUs) and eventually to the end users.

Their breakdowns are said to have resulted from severe mechanical failures due to boiler tube leaks, turbine trips, or generator damage.

In such cases, NGCP would have to require DUs to implement manual load droppings or rotational brownouts among their coverage areas.

The region has also yet to fully benefit from the planned Mindoro-Panay interconnection, which has long been viewed as another critical project to improve reliability and diversify power sources for Western Visayas.

Why, oh why, when, unless my informant was lying, there are around 260 major grid-connected power plants in the Philippines?

Two of them are Palm Concepcion Power Corp. (PCPC) in Concepcion, Iloilo and Panay Energy and Development Corp. (PEDC) in Iloilo City.

PCPC and PEDC coal-fired power plant have also experienced critical unplanned outages.

Needless to say, under the law of supply and demand, the prices go up as supply comes down.

However, why blame MORE Power and other distribution utilities that merely distribute electricity generated by the power plants?

The amount in the electricity bill depends on purchases made in preceding months, and so the high prices recorded this August will be billed in September.

MORE Power charges an average residential rate of PHP 14.45 per kilowatt-hour for the August 2026 billing cycle, 10 centavos higher than the previous month, while the average commercial rate is PHP 13.58 per kilowatt-hour. However, it retains only around 10% of the billed amount.

The lion’s share is divided into several pass-through charges, with generation charge – the actual cost of producing electricity from power plants — comprising approximately 55% to 64% of the  residential electricity bill.

The transmission charge covers the fee for sending electricity over high-voltage power lines from the plants to local DUs.

The system loss charge refers to the cost of power that is lost or stolen before it reaches homes. It includes technical leaks and illegal connections.

Taxes: A 12% Value-Added Tax (VAT) is added to many parts of the bill, which greatly increases the final cost.

Subsidies and other fees make up the extra charges that fund renewable energy programs and special discounts for low-income and senior-citizen households.